What Can Brown Do For You?

IN APRIL 2003, Brown University president Ruth Simmons invited more than a dozen members of the Brown community to serve on a Committee on Slavery and Justice. The committee lay mostly dormant until March of this year, when its existence was made public (Brown arranged for the news to break in the New York Times). Since then, the committee has attracted much attention because (1) Ruth Simmons is, as the Times trumpets, "a great-granddaughter of slaves," as well as the first black Ivy League president; and (2) the committee may set precedent on the issue of reparations.

As the Times puts it, Simmons "has directed Brown to start what its officials say is an unprecedented undertaking for a university: an exploration of reparations for slavery and specifically whether Brown should pay reparations or otherwise make amends for its past."

IF YOU WANTED TO PUT a kind, contemplative face on the reparations movement, you could hardly do better than Professor Jim Campbell, the chair of the Committee on Slavery and Justice. Campbell is fond of telling the story of the brig Sally, which he recounts to me over the phone: There is a large antique clock in the dean's office at Brown. On it is a plaque identifying it as the family clock of Revolutionary War hero Admiral Esek Hopkins.

"What it doesn't tell you," Campbell explains, "is that in 1765, Esek Hopkins was the captain of a brig called the Sally." The Sally sailed from Providence to West Africa on a slaving mission on behalf of the four Brown brothers, and they collected some 170 slaves. On the return voyage, the ship's cargo was decimated by smallpox, followed by a slave revolt, which Hopkins and his crew put down. Of the 170-odd slaves who boarded the ship, only 24 were sold. Three of the Brown brothers (including Nicholas Brown, Jr., the university's namesake) never traded slaves again.

"Now, what do you do with the clock?" Campbell asks. "Why I love that story . . . is it drives home the fact that the world is complicated. . . . There are some people who I'm sure based on this would want to throw the clock away; and there's some people who would want to rip off the celebratory plaque; and there are some people who would probably want to put another plaque on telling the story of the Sally alongside the plaque that's on there. . . . The point is that individuals, institutions, and societies have histories that are mixed and include things that are gracious and beautiful and things that are shameful and horrifying."

Professor Campbell downplays the relationship between reparations and the committee's charge. He insists that the committee members are more interested in thinking about slavery and justice as an intellectual matter, and that they have no preconceived ideas of where their exploration will lead.

"Monetary reparations is simply one model for thinking about how societies and institutions go about redressing legacies of injustice," he explains.

HOWEVER, THERE ARE REASONS the media coverage has fixated on reparations and not the committee's more intellectual pursuits. For starters, Brown University is a potential target for reparations lawsuits. In 2002, a class-action suit was filed against Fleet Bank and several other corporations for having benefited from slave labor. The suit was dismissed, but in the filing, the plaintiffs mentioned both Brown and Harvard Law School as two other institutions whose early benefactions can be traced back to slavery and the slave trade.

The committee's findings will have a ripple effect in the larger world, too. If Brown were to decide on some form of reparations, it would put pressure on the rest of the Ivy League to take similar action. But even if Brown ultimately decides against reparations, putting the question on the table legitimizes reparations as an option worthy of consideration. And if reparations are a morally acceptable choice, then choosing not to pay them becomes a difficult matter.

Still, it seems unlikely that Brown will decide to pay out large sums of money to a wide swath of people. "Me personally, I'm a little bit mixed on [reparations]," says Seth Magaziner, one of three undergraduate students on the committee. "I don't think it would do many people a whole lot of good for Brown to write a check, or a series of checks. On the other hand, maybe there are things Brown can do to help fix the inequities in society using its resources as an academic institution."

What Magaziner is getting at is a new regime of preferences which would exist not under the rubric of diversity, but as part of a scheme of reparations. Committee members mention scholarships, admissions and faculty hiring practices as potential avenues for reparations to be paid at Brown.